{"id":11927,"date":"2016-02-14T04:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-02-14T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=11927"},"modified":"2016-02-14T04:00:10","modified_gmt":"2016-02-14T10:00:10","slug":"the-literary-corner-bernard-cornwells-professional-fictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/02\/14\/the-literary-corner-bernard-cornwells-professional-fictions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Literary Corner: Bernard Cornwell’s Professional Fictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a writer, I am also a prolific reader. My two favorite genres for fiction are without a doubt spy thrillers and historical fiction. I was introduced to Bernard Cornwell a few years ago by my good friend, Mr. A. We both share a keen interest in Viking history and lore and he suggested I try out the Saxon Tales by Cornwell. Well, after I finished the first book in the series, The Last Kingdom, I was hooked, and the rest as they say, is History, or in this case, Historical Fiction! I am now on the Fifth book of the series, the Burning Land. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

BBC also recently premiered a mini-series based on the Saxon tale books entitled after the first book of the series;”The Last Kingdom”. Although not near as good as the books, it is a good watch. You can catch the entire first season on Amazon. -SF<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\"LK1\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019re over twenty books into the series about Richard Sharpe, a British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. Four books into the adventures of Nathaniel Starbuck, fighting for the South in the American Civil War\u2014along with three books of Warlord Chronicles, set in the years after Rome\u2019s retreat from the British Isles, and four books about a belated Grail Quest, set during the Hundred Years\u2019 War.<\/p>\n

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Add in five modern sea thrillers, five stand-alone historical novels, a non-fiction account of Waterloo\u2014together with Warriors of the Storm<\/a><\/em>, this winter\u2019s entry in the nine-volume Saxon series, set during the tenth-century Danish invasions of England\u2014and Bernard Cornwell has been about as busy as it is possible for a writer to be, penning over fifty books since 1981.<\/p>\n

A handful of contemporary authors are celebrated\u2014rightly or wrongly\u2014for elevating genre fiction up into the airy heights of literature. John le Carr\u00e9, for example: While serious writers from Joseph Conrad to Graham Greene have played with spy themes, le Carr\u00e9 is often cited as the author who took the spy novel precisely as a popular genre fiction and raised it to literature. Patrick O\u2019Brian is similarly counted by many as the man who showed that the small but steady field of Napoleonic sea stories could be the means for realizing high literary aspirations. George MacDonald Fraser\u2019s twelve Flashman<\/em> books may have started as comic historical novels\u2014with a protagonist lifted fromTom Brown\u2019s Schooldays<\/em>\u2014but they developed into a vehicle for a good bit of historical and social commentary.<\/p>\n

Bernard Cornwell is rarely cited among these names. And maybe that\u2019s with good reason. He has a serviceable prose, but it\u2019s nothing to write home about. As you would expect for one of the bestselling authors in the genre of historical military fiction, Cornwell shows a talent for describing violence: His fights are always exciting, but he never allows the overall course of a battle to be lost in the details of a single soldier\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n

He achieves his clean effects, however, by a stripping down his scenes and skimping on descriptions of incidental settings and the culture that surrounds his characters.<\/p>\n

Cornwell prides himself on the historical accuracy of his books, as well he ought. But it is a thin accuracy, limited to the stories\u2019 fast-paced action. He knows exactly how a Baker rifle would work in the hands of a skirmisher during Wellington\u2019s campaign through Portugal and Spain\u2014even while it\u2019s not certain he knows why, exactly, the British were there in Portugal and Spain. For a certain kind of writer, writing fictional stories drawn from actual military history, it\u2019s enough that the grander events of the story did<\/em> take place. Their only necessary justification is their factual reality, and the fiction weaves its fictional characters like decorative stiches on the fabric of history as it actually happened.<\/p>\n

Whether in his Sharpe series of 19th-century battles or his tales of warfare in the Dark Ages, Cornwell uses his descriptions of the mechanics and tools of war to build his historical settings. And that, I think, is something of a departure from the normal course of such soldier novels. If your sense as a reader is that his technique is more typical of naval stories, you would be right. Cornwell once suggested that\u2014with the 1981 Sharpe\u2019s Eagle<\/em>\u2014he began his stories of a foot soldier in the Napoleonic Wars because there wasn\u2019t anything equivalent to the popular naval fiction set in that era. Although he loved sailing, he thought that the Duke of Wellington, not Admiral Nelson, was the greatest military figure that Britain threw against Napoleon, and he wanted to do for the British soldier in popular fiction what C.S. Forester had done for the British sailor in his Hornblower<\/em> novels.<\/p>\n

Not that fiction hadn\u2019t told the story of soldiers before. The historical novel found its modern form with Walter Scott\u2019s 1814 Waverley<\/em>, the tale of a British officer fighting with the Scottish armies. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle published a fine set of stories about Brigadier Gerard, a vain French soldier for Napoleon (and a little-noticed model for the military comedy George MacDonald Fraser\u2019s achieved with Sir Harry Flashman).<\/p>\n

Cornwell\u2019s breakthrough, however, was to start telling land-based military stories as though they were sea-based\u2014the soldier tale as though it were a sailor tale. The narrative is both detailed, in the way that Forester would tell how to change sails, and clean, in the way that Forester would convey a battle. Or even better than Forester, first because the details of soldiering are less complex than the details of sailing, and second because Cornwell is simply a better writer than Forester, never tempted by his predecessor\u2019s sentimentality or willingness to let accounts of a character\u2019s quirks masquerade as development of a character\u2019s psychology.<\/p>\n

Cornwell tends to thicken his characters by placing them in situations where they have conflicting demands on their honor and their talents. Richard Sharpe, his skirmisher in the fight against Napoleon, is a thug and ruffian from the British rookeries and slums who rises in the service of Wellington\u2014and who is thereby lost in social class, pulled both by his impulse to solve all things with treachery and violence, and by his regulated behavior as an officer and a gentleman. Nathaniel Starbuck, Cornwell\u2019s Civil War soldier, is a Northerner who ends up fighting for the Confederacy. Thomas of Hookton, his English archer, is caught up in a hunt for the Holy Grail, a chivalrous pursuit in the very era that announced the end of the medieval ideal of chivalry.<\/p>\n

And in his Saxon chronicles, Cornwell tells the tale of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a child of a Saxon lord in Northumbria who was captured and brought up Danish raiders. Beginning with The Last Kingdom<\/em>in 2004 and extending to the latest volume with Warriors of the Storm<\/em>, Cornwell has been using the series to raise awareness of the historical foundation of England, in those moments when Alfred the Great fought off the Danes and established what Cornwell believes is the first unified people that could be called English.<\/p>\n

Even more than Cornwell\u2019s other characters, Uhtred is pulled by multiple forces. His battle sense is pure Viking, but his people are the Saxons. His own son converts to the rising religion of Christianity, which he feels a betrayal of the pagan gods he knows.<\/p>\n

Set in the years after Alfred\u2019s death, Warriors of the Storm<\/em> opens with \u00c6thelflaed taking charge of Mercia while her brother Edward extends his own kingdom of Wessex into East Anglia. The Danes have been defeated everywhere except Northumbria, but the Viking raids have not stopped, and the Irish are beginning to eye the piecemeal kingdoms of England. The battles against the Danes may have proved Uhtred as the soul of Mercia, the kingdom\u2019s greatest warrior, but there is no simple answer to the conflict of oaths and loyalties he faces.<\/p>\n

The insoluble conflict of rival duties is a constant theme of tragedy, from works as great as Antigone<\/em>on down. Cornwell tends to use the struggle a little mechanically, as though the very fact of conflicting duties is enough to establish a character as three dimensional and well rounded. But it\u2019s still a richer vein to mine for a story than Forester managed, and if Cornwell\u2019s characters aren\u2019t as thick as Patrick O\u2019Brian\u2019s Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin, well, his stories move at a faster pace. O\u2019Brian once complained that there was \u201ctoo much plot, not enough lifestyle\u201d in Cornwell\u2019s historical fiction\u2014but that\u2019s the point. In books such as Warriors of the Storm<\/em>, Bernard Cornwell lets battle do his work for him, his historical settings conveyed through the characters\u2019 internal conflicts as they stride through a landscape of war.<\/p>\n

And if the result isn\u2019t high literature, it\u2019s still very good genre work: readable, fast, informative, and fun. A professional fiction, with all that the word professional<\/em> conveys.<\/p>\n

Read the Original Article at Free Beacon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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As a writer, I am also a prolific reader. My two favorite genres for fiction are without a doubt spy thrillers and historical fiction. I was introduced to Bernard Cornwell a few years ago by my good friend, Mr. A. We both share a keen interest in Viking history and lore and he suggested I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[932,1427,4634],"tags":[4633,3329,4635,4636,4637],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}